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Thanks,

David Dobbs

]]>http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/07/28/my-new-blog-address/feed/12A food blog I can’t digesthttp://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/07/07/a-food-blog-i-cant-digest/
http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/07/07/a-food-blog-i-cant-digest/#commentsWed, 07 Jul 2010 10:57:28 +0000http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/07/07/a-food-blog-i-cant-digest/Hoo boy. I never thought I’d have to resign a blogging position in protest. But so I find.

I’m dismayed at ScienceBlogs’ decision to run material written by PepsiCo as what amounts to editorial content — equivalent, that is, to the dozens of blogs written by scientists, bloggers, and writers who come with a different, more straightforward sort of agenda. This is like having Pfizer run CME; it presents problems I can’t overlook. My Sblings should and will do as they see and feel best, and can and will do so without censure or judgment from me. But I cannot help but feel complicit in this if I stay.

PepsiCo wants this spot, and can gain from it, only because the bloggers here have sought to write genuinely as individuals trying to communicate something genuinely arising from their own minds and work. But PepsciCo — I speak of the company, not of the individuals slated to write for Food Frontiers, of whom I know little — clearly has a different agenda, which is to use the whatever credibility that the bloggers here generate for the site to improve the company’s standing and credibility about food. That is a job they should do with their food.

As PalMD and others have pointed out, PepsiCo hardly lacks platform. The only value they can gain from writing here is to draw on the credibility created by a bunch of independent voices engaged in earnest,= thoughtful (well, most of the time), and genuine conversation. Even if PepsiCo were not paying for the privilege — and I’d be quite surprised to find they aren’t, for why would ScienceBlogs risk its credibility otherwise? — this would be a problem. As it is, however, assuming PepsiCo is paying, then they’re buying credibility generated by others even as they damage same.

Call me old-fashioned, but I can’t cotton to this. With the addition of Food Frontiers, ScienceBlogs has redrawn the boundaries of what it considers legitimate and constructive blogo-journalism about science. In doing so they define an environment I can’t live comfortably in. So with this post I’m leaving ScienceBlogs. For the moment I am moving my blog to Neuron Culture, hosted by WordPress, while considering other venues that might make sense for me. See below for links to the new Neuron Culture as well as other ways to follow me and my writing.

I know all too well that the changing media landscape presents financial challenges. But this isn’t the way to meet them. ﻿

___

Neuron Culture will continue/resume here. It’s missing some recent posts at the moment due to an export/import snafu I’m in the midst of correcting.

To subscribe to its new RSS feed (for Google Reader and such), go here.

The rise of this type of citizen journalism [i.e., journalism via blogs] has, in my view, increasingly exposed some of the laziness and corruption in the professional version – even as there is still a huge amount to treasure and value in the legacy media, and a huge amount of partisan, mendacious claptrap on the blogs.

But what distinguishes the best of the new media is what could still be recaptured by the old: the mischievous spirit of journalism and free, unfettered inquiry. Journalism has gotten too pompous, too affluent, too self-loving, and too entwined with the establishment of both wings of American politics to be what we need it to be.

We need it to be fearless and obnoxious, out of a conviction that more speech, however much vulgarity and nonsense it creates, is always better than less speech. In America, this is a liberal spirit in the grandest sense of that word – but also a conservative one, since retaining that rebelliousness is tending to an ancient American tradition, from the Founders onward.

And this juicyness as well:

“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper,” — Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785﻿

You just never know what’ll catch fire. Then again, maybe I should have figured “Ozzy Osbourne” and “genome” would have. In any case, Ozzy simply buried every other contender this past month, racking up 7 times as many hits as any other entry ever did in one month — and accounting for two-thirds of June’s unique pageviews altogether. The power of Stumbleupon. A fifth of those readers went on to other pages. So maybe something good came of it.

I bring to this a bit of history: About a year or 18 months ago, I had several discussions with an editor (at Wired, of all places; this was going to be a sort of anti-Wired piece) about doing a story exploring a more tightly constrained version of Carr’s argument: I would flesh out the notion that consuming digital culture, even just words on the net instead of words on the page, likely wired the brain differently than reading on the page did. I pitched the story because I wondered if that was happening to me; reading on the web felt different; perhaps it affected brain and cognitive development proportionately﻿.

Perhaps things have changed since then, but at the time, we decided against doing the story because in a couple days of surveying literature and making phone calls to people who studied reading from a neuroscientific point of view … well folks, I could not find anyone with data showing such rewiring. ﻿

A few days ago Jonah Lehrer put up a lovely post about stuttering and Tourette’s syndrome. He looks at stuttering, Updike, Kanye — and a couple papers suggesting that many people with Tourette’s (and by extension, I suppose, perhaps stuttering) develop

a compensatory change … whereby the chronic suppression of tics results in a generalized suppression of reflexive behavior in favor of increased cognitive control.” In other words, the struggle makes us stronger.﻿

Jonah chose his studies well; you should read his (fairly brief) post to see how they that reveal this apparently increased cognitive control, and for the other pleasure the post delivers.

Meanwhile, I was struck — as was one of Jonah’s readers — by how these compensatory mechanisms echoed the upside-to-the-downside dynamics that I looked at in my article on the orchid or sensitivity hypothesis. That hypothesis asserts that certain gene variants that put us at risk for mood or behavioral issues such as depression, ADHD, or antisocial behavior can have upsides if a person’s experience and other assets are favorable. For instance, the heightened sensitivity to social connections that can depress you if you family and social world is hell can help make you especially successful and happy if you’re luckier with family and social environment.

So back to Tourette’s. As Jonah points out, the work he looks at in his piece suggests that perhaps Tourette’s problems is the the downside expression of a broader dynamic — a sort of linguistico-sensory-socio-cognitive hypersensitivity — that carries benefits:

That’s also the message [Jonah writes] of a brand new paper which shows an increase in “timing control” in people with Tourette’s. Here’s the BPS Research Digest:

Carmelo Vicario and colleagues tested nine children with Tourette’s (average age 11 years) and 10 controls (average age 12) on timing perception and timing production. The former involved the children judging whether two circles were on screen for the same length of time or not. The latter task involved the children noting the time that a circle appeared on-screen and then pressing the space key on a key board for the same duration. Half the trials involved intervals in the sub-second range (from 310ms to 500ms), the other half were longer than a second, up to 1900ms.

There was no difference between the groups on timing perception or sub-second timing production. However, the children with Tourette’s were more accurate at the longer ‘supra-second’ version of the timing production task.

On a related note, it’s interesting to think about these timing control advantages in light of the fact that Tim Howard, the goalie on the U.S. World Cup squad, has Tourette’s. Here’s Hampton Sides in the New Yorker:

He [Howard] refuses to take medication for [Tourette’s] for fear it will make him “zombielike” and impair his motor skills. “I’m very adrenaline-filled, and I wouldn’t want to suppress that,” Howard said. “I like the way I am. If I woke up tomorrow without Tourette’s, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.“

Splendid stuff. The question is: Is the apparently increased cognitive control a necessary part of whatever creates Tourette’s — another expression of it — or do people develop this control as a compensatory mechanism? I think — and I say this not knowing much about Tourette’s — that the latter is perhaps more likely. If that’s so, then this isn’t really an example of the orchid/sensitivity dynamic: It’s not the upside of a trait that can in other cases create a downside; rather it’s an upside created in compensation of a downside.

This makes it no less wonderful. We have few assets more valualbe than our ability to compensate and correct for deficits. If I’m short-tempered, I can learn to be quick to apologize. If I’m tall so I have trouble getting low for backhands, I can train and practice and learn to get lower. If I write slowly, I can compensate by trying to write more deeply. (Or does the deep make me slow? Hm. That one’s complicated.) But these aren’t the same as a sensitivity that can take one either down or up.

So what about Howard’s aversion to medication? He doesn’t want it because he doesn’t want to be less “adrenaline-filled.” I suspect that the suppressing effect of Tourette’s medication, however, doesn’t mean that his high-octane style is part of his Tourette’s. Then again, as I note, I don’t know Tourette’s so well, so perhaps there’s something there.

Anyone?﻿

]]>http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/28/tourettes-goalie-timing-and-do/feed/10An interview in which I’m on the wrong side of the tablehttp://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/28/an-interview-in-which-im-on-th/
http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/28/an-interview-in-which-im-on-th/#commentsMon, 28 Jun 2010 09:24:48 +0000http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/28/an-interview-in-which-im-on-th/Research Digest has posted an q&a interview with me as part of their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits. Do read the rest there, as well as the other interviews already run and to come.

On why I write about psychology, psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences:

Science constitutes our most serious and rigorous attempt to understand the world — and psychiatry, psychology, and now neuroscience make great material partly because they so often and starkly show science’s power and pitfalls. These disciplines are hard. The people who work in them, whether researching, treating patients or both, are trying to discern and treat enormously complex and opaque dynamics.

Some do brilliant work. Others, both now and through the centuries, have come up with some really fascinating wrong ideas, some of them, like phrenology, hare-brained and obviously corrupt, and others, like Freudian psychology, more rigorous but in the end almost as badly flawed empirically. Freud created a brilliant, beautiful, and disciplined body of work — a gorgeously developed account of how we think and behave — that ultimately fails as science because you can’t falsify it. Meanwhile, Cajal was figuring out the neuron — and quietly laid a path now being followed to much greater effect.

At their best, these disciplines try to find empirical ways to understand human behavior, mood, and thinking, and to treat problems in the same areas. And even as we’re starting to get a few real insights into the brain, these disciplines offer one object lesson after another in the challenges and dangers of science. Take neuroimaging alone. You get brilliant people like Helen Mayberg, who uses imaging to create and test deep, complex, substantial ideas about how depression works. And you get others who claim they can read an fMRI and tell you whether someone is lying. And in between you encounter — sometimes starkly, sometimes subtly — every kind of intellectual, financial, cultural, and personal issue that generate what we call conflicts of interest — that is, the desires and motivations that pull scientists or medical people away from solid, empirically based science and practice and into murky terrain. Meanwhile you get the very cool technical solutions people devise, and the lovely long detective-story-level intellectual puzzles they solve.

All that, and a million alluring ideas about why we act, think, and feel the ways we do. There’s no end to the richness. ﻿

On my blog’s ‘mission':

Same as my writing in general, only faster. I want to write about science, nature, medicine, culture, and — the big fun — how they overlap. Blogging lets me do this in quicker, more provisional takes. It lets me revise my provisional takes and respond more fluidly to other people’s provisional takes. It lets me elaborate or post sources on longform articles I’ve written for print. It lets me write about things I’ll deal with more deeply in my book on behavioral genetics — and on related issues I won’t have room for in my book. All that, and I can post YouTube mashups ofSoviet soldiers dancing to hip-hop. I can write about curveballs and Sandy Koufax. Twice.

Many significant human pleasures are universal,” Bloom writes. “But they are not biological adaptations. They are byproducts of mental systems that have evolved for other purposes.” Evolutionary psychologists like Bloom are fond of explaining perplexing psychological attributes this way. These traits emerged, the argument goes, as accidental accompaniments to other traits that help us survive and reproduce.

]]>http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/27/paul-bloom-pleasure-is-a-by-pr/feed/0David Foster Wallace is, indeed, Smarter than You Thinkhttp://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/25/david-foster-wallace-is-indeed/
http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/25/david-foster-wallace-is-indeed/#commentsFri, 25 Jun 2010 09:58:31 +0000http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2010/06/25/david-foster-wallace-is-indeed/Every time I read David Foster Wallace, I think, that’s just classic David Foster Wallace. Which is to say it’s completely unexpected, novel, different from the way almost anyone else thinks, including David Foster Wallace the last time I read him.

This is a fun review in the NY Review of Books of a book about Wallace I think I now must get.

I like the title. That’s Wallace: Smarter than you think. And even smarter than you think or remember Wallace is from last time you read him.

“What I would love to do is a profile of one of you guys who’s doin’ a profile of me,” David Foster Wallace told the journalist David Lipsky in 1996 during a series of conversations now collected as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. “It would be a way,” Wallace continued, “for me to get some of the control back”:

[excerpt] You can’t tell outright lies that I’ll then deny to the fact checker. But…you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing…. I want to be able to try and shape and manage the impression of me that’s coming across. [end excerpt]

As Lipsky tells us in his introduction, he loved Wallace’s idea of profiling the profilers:

[excerpt] It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized in–the unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices…. That’s what this book would like to be. It’s the one way of writing about him I don’t think David would have hated. [end excerpt]

When you pick up an object, you might think that you are manipulating it, but in a sense, it is also manipulating you. Through a series of six psychological experiments, Joshua Ackerman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that the properties that we feel through touch – texture, hardness, weight – can all influence the way we think.

Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview candidates as more serious and social problems as more pressing. Texture is linked to difficulty and harshness. Touching rough sandpaper makes social interactions seem more adversarial, while smooth wood makes them seem friendlier. Finally, hardness is associated with rigidity and stability. When sitting on a hard chair, negotiators take tougher stances but if they sit on a soft one instead, they become more flexible.﻿

Makes me wonder: Could the chair you sit in shape your psychotherapy session?﻿﻿

According to Ackerman, these effects happen because our understanding of abstract concepts is deeply rooted in physical experiences. Touch is the first of our senses to develop. In the earliest days of our lives, our ability to feel things like texture and temperature provides a tangible framework that we can use to understand more nebulous notions like importance or personal warmth. Eventually, the two become tied together, so that touching objects can activate the concepts that they are associated with.

This idea is known as “embodied cognition” and the metaphors and idioms in our languages provide hints about such associations. The link between weight and importance comes through in phrases such as “heavy matters” and the “gravity of the situation”. We show the link between texture and harshness when we describe a “rough day” or “coarse language”. And the link between hardness and stability or rigidity becomes clear when we describe someone as “hard-hearted” or “being a rock”.